Help minimise power consumption (and heat) on Topton/Kingdel N100/N150 systems
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I've used dozens of Qotom mini PCs in the past for pfsense. They have all been great. Usually 7-8w at idle and only slightly warm to touch.
I recently used a Topton N100 and a Kingdel N150 system (Topton and Kingdel are the same) and despite the CPU having supposedly far lower power consumption, these systems will not draw less than 13w at idle and they are roasting hot to touch. There is no way the internal components will last.
I've already tried quite a number of potential fixes without success, outlined here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1o4dat0/kingdeltopton_n100n150_mini_pcs_too_much_power/
I feel like many of the options in the UEFI setup aren't actually doing anything. It always seems to run all cores between 1.4GHz and 2.1GHz, even at idle, which seems excessive. Since that post, I've moved my Speed Shift setting to 95, with no noticeable change.
Any other ideas?
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Update: Enabling ASPM in all the separate PCI-E root ports helped a bit. Now idling at 10W and noticeably closer to an acceptable temperature to touch. It's still no Qotom Celeron 3865U system (I measured that one today at just 5W) but it helps.
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How hot exactly is the CPU running?
There's quite an extensive thread about these boxes though. IIRC some users swapped the BIOS for something with more options available.
